Sterile chicken eggs, to be marketed for consumption as food, are usually produced by housing the hens in relatively small cages during the producing life of the birds. Fertile eggs, primarily used for raising broilers or meat birds but also used in some quantity by the drug industry for making vaccines, etc., must come from hens that have mated with roosters, and the birds must therefore have free space to live together as well as nests available to the hens for laying eggs. Heretofore, a usual practice has been to provide nest housings located within a chicken house having a substantial free floor space, and to provide wood shavings or other litter both on the free floor space of the house and in the nest housings. When litter is employed in the nest housings, the purpose is to make the nest more attractive to the hen, and to that extent this practice has been successful. However, this practice has several disadvantages. First, with litter employed in a conventional nest, it is necessary to collect the eggs from the nest by hand, since the litter tends to prevent eggs from passing through the exit openings of the usual roll-away nests. Next, with conventional nests, a nest in which litter is provided is sometimes not enough more attractive to the hen than is the litter on the free floor space of the house, and the hens tend to lay an excessive number of eggs on the floor of the house. So-called "floor eggs" are lost, and economics demands that floor eggs be held to, e.g., not more than 5% of the total eggs laid. Also, the tendency for hens to lay eggs on the floor of the chicken house is accentuated because it is desirable to have large hens, typically the "boiler-breeders" which have a weight of 8-9 pounds, and the large hens tend to avoid the effort necessary to gain access to the nest housing. A further problem is that, with conventional nest and nest floor materials, which have been used in roll-away nest housings, and especially with the use of litter on such materials, excessive labor costs are encountered in attempting to keep the nests clean. Some success has been achieved in using roll-away nests for the production of fertile eggs, mainly for the drug industry, when small birds have been used, leghorns being typical. However, no truly successful way has heretofore been found to induce the larger hens, and particularly the broiler-breeders, to use the roll-away nests, and there has been a continuing need for improvement.